The price is agreed long before the cost is known.

How the work runs

The path this business already walks.

Written for Event and wedding florists and floral designers who quote from a look, buy from a market, and build and install against a date that does not move.

Steps marked for approval wait for a person. Andiamo SMB is not yet offered to customers; the parts each step leans on, and how far along they are, are listed further down.

1. Look

   A look, a date and a budget arrive as one message

   An enquiry for event work carries pictures of something somebody else made, a venue, a date that will not shift, and a figure the client already has in mind. Those details decide whether the job is worth taking, and they belong on the client record from the first message rather than split between a mailbox and a saved folder. The reply is drafted from the incoming message and held until a person has read the exact wording; sending approved replies is still being built.

   Human approval
2. Recipe

   A piece is stems and labour before it is a price

   Nothing can be quoted until the work is broken down the way it is actually bought and built: stem counts per piece, the hard goods it stands in, and the bench hours it takes to make. That breakdown is the only thing that makes an event costable, and today it usually lives in a spreadsheet rebuilt from scratch for every enquiry. Holding recipes as a maintained catalogue that proposals and invoices draw from is designed and not built, and so is one record per event that every document and message hangs off.

3. Estimate

   A quote is a promise about flowers nobody has cut yet

   What protects the margin is being explicit in the document itself: what is being priced, how substitutions will be handled, and what happens when the market moves under the design. Proposal options a client reviews and chooses from in the portal are in development, and sending one waits for a person to approve the exact document, though delivery is still being built. Once the deposit clears, the event can become a card the whole studio works from.

   Human approval
4. Substitutions

   The season moves between the agreement and the week of the event

   A crop fails, a colour comes in the wrong shade, the variety that carried the whole palette is not on the market that week. Each swap changes the recipe and often the cost, and the client has to be told in a way that does not reopen the design. Today that conversation happens over text and stays on the phone that had it. Text-message history in one timeline on the client record is in development; recording a substitution with the price adjustment it triggers, held for approval, is designed and not built.

   Human approval
5. Market week

   The buy goes in late and the cooler starts filling

   Buying happens close to the date because the material will not wait. The wholesaler order, the market run, the conditioning that starts the moment boxes land, and the order pieces are built in are one dependent chain, and a step missed on the earliest morning shows up in what goes on the van. A board of job cards with a checklist on each is in development; assignable tasks with owners and due dates across the whole event are designed and not built.

6. Install

   You are building in someone else's room on someone else's clock

   The window is whatever the venue leaves between the previous booking and the guests arriving, and it is shared with the caterer, the lighting crew and the band. What the crew needs is the load-in door, the hours either side of the window, what goes where, and who is carrying it. From one description of the day, a logistics view of setup, placement and breakdown can be derived alongside a view written for the client. That generator is exercised in testing, saving the schedules for a business is switched off by default, and delivering them is not built. Assigning freelance hands to the event by role is designed and not built.

7. Strike

   The vessels come back or they come out of the margin

   Stands, vases, candelabra, mirror plates and mechanics go out with the flowers and are the studio's own stock. Somebody has to collect them, count them against what left, and chase what did not come home, usually the morning after a long day. A spoken note on the drive back becomes proposed changes to the record that wait for a person to apply or reject them, and the review screen for those is not built yet. Follow-up drafts prepared for a person to approve are in development, and preparing the balance reminder for a person to release is designed and not built.

   Human approval